There’s the world we know — the one we can see, hear, smell, and touch — and there is the world in between. It exists around us, within the spaces within spaces. Overlapping and overlapping, like a Venn diagram wherein who we are is defined by what takes up space from the cross-sections. If we were to identify these spaces, could we then somehow take control of ourselves? Of the world we engage with? In his feature length directorial debut, filmmaker Michael Felker (Would You Like to Try Again?) explores what happens we when try to take control of the chaos within these spaces in his supernatural thriller Things Will Be Different, having its world premiere at SXSW 2024. Not only does its apparent simplicity belie a more complex and philosophical nature, it’s a most audacious and edge-of-your-seat thriller that lingers.
L-R: Adam David Thompson as Joseph and Riley Dandy as Sidney in THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. Photo Credit: Carissa Dorson. Photo courtesy of SXSW.
Siblings Joseph and Sidney (Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy, respectively) are on the run from police after committing a robbery, but they have a plan. With information from one of the patrons at his bar, Joseph leads Sidney to an abandoned farmhouse where they can lay low and return to their lives with the financial means to make right a lot of wrongs. With this money, things can be different for them both and Sidney’s six-year-old daughter. But with the cops getting closer, they will need an incredibly secure and safe hideout, and the one Joseph is taking them to possesses a door to the past. Except neither realize that the cost to step backward in time may be more costly than either could possible realize.
According to the press notes, Felker states that he was a PA on the Rustic Films release Resolution, which Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead fans will recognize as the writer/director/acting team’s first feature and an intersectional point in their 2017 sci-fi thriller The Endless. Felker’s been working with them for some time as an editor, specifically on Spring (2014), The Endless, Synchronic (2019), and Something in the Dirt (2022). Though one can clearly identify Different as Felker’s own work, the influence of working with Rustic Films is in near every frame — and this is incredibly complimentary. The most obvious component is the utilization of time travel. Truthfully, this is more mechanism for the larger ideas of the film rather than something that needs to be explained (like how Synchronic doesn’t fully explain how the drug works, it just does) which gives more room for what does matter. Instead, the utilization of time travel functions as an extension of memory and regret, the way in which we, as individuals, already time travel when we search our memories and relive sounds, smells, or emotions along with flittering, not-always-clear images in our minds. Felker’s script doesn’t skip over the time travel, so much as the reasons for why it works matters less in the grand scheme. However, if given any kind of scrutiny, one starts to piece things together for themselves, giving the sensation that Felker trusts the audience to fill in the negative space in order to focus on what matters: the relationship between the siblings and how time impacts them. Through this lens, Different grows richer as audiences will roll around individual scenes in their mind, maneuvering them from one position to another, peering at them, inspecting them from different sides, and coming away with new details that shift the entirety of what they may have first believed. Thus the mystery within Different transfers from “how does it work?” to “what does it mean?” and that, dear reader, slams into you like a sucker punch. This is where the script collides with things like cinematography and editing so that the emotional zenith lands.
L-R: Riley Dandy as Sidney and Adam David Thompson as Joseph in THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT. Photo Credit: Carissa Dorson. Photo courtesy of SXSW.
Spaces within spaces within spaces. As an audience, we’re given neither time nor place, but location — that of a farmhouse surrounded by nature. It’s the presentation of a vibrant and healthy forest, the audience unable to literally see the forest for the trees, cinematographer Carissa Dorson (Queer Riot) gives to us the sensation of an endlessness as the thin tree stalks continue on forever only to shift the perspective upward, showing us the sky through the leaves and branches, the sun blinding us as we try to look into the heavens. Spaces within spaces within spaces. In a scene where Sidney leaves the main house to go outside, Dorson makes sure to capture the door closing and then shifts the angle to watch her walk away, the audience perspective staring out of the glass. We are kept at a distance, stuck in one space, following behind, waiting our turn to catch up. Here, the cinematography not only continues the visual language of the film, conveying how this tale largely exists within its own pocket of spacetime, but of the characters themselves and the spaces they contain. From time to time, such as when a character shares a memories, the actor is placed as though looking directly at us, the fringes of frame blurred so that we’re drawn to exactly where Felker wants us to look, before we dive into a memory. Spaces within spaces within spaces. The editing from Felker and co-editor Rebeca Marques (Would You Like to Try Again?) controlling not just pacing of the overall film, but manufacturing a specific perspective that causes the audience to infer viewpoint. The best of both editing and cinematography coming in various slight-of-hand moments wherein the audience is given countless pieces of information from a simple camera pan in real time that transports the audience through time. Spaces within spaces within spaces, each one a new layer for which the audiences, via the characters, must explore, investigate, and, with luck, survive. But when memory is the root of the spaces in which we exist and memory is driven by emotions and choices of the past, how helpful can that be to survive the present?
Thus, the film gives way to its strongest pieces: the performances from Dandy and Thompson. The bulk of Different is a two-hander as most of the other characters are either disembodied voices, figures in a space (like a waitress in a diner), or some other presentation of a lived-in world. The majority of the early dialogue between them is exposition, but it works as natural conversation that also provides the opportunities to institute the stylistic choices which will illustrate the spaces within. We, as an audience, quickly buy that there’s closeness between the two, yet a reluctance, a hesitancy, but from what and why is unclear until well in to the film. Any film which utilizes a method of trapping for a bulk of a film, such as here where the siblings must work together to be free from pursuit, a certain amount of “hell is other people” comes into play; however, Felker avoids most of the traps by addressing them sooner rather than later. It’s a smart move as it creates an aura of unpredictably, thereby enhancing what Dandy and Thompson do and make their choices far more concrete and significant. Through these two performers, what could be a typical film of familial exploration, a “ties that bind” examination, is able to probe deeper, making both Joseph and Sidney cyphers for regret, personal isolation, and the desperate need to make things right to be people we believe to be in our care. Dandy and Thompson come to represent the duality of humanity and what we owe one another when one presumes the responsibility of stewardship. For all the sci-fi mystery that Different employs, little of it means anything if we don’t care about the characters and these performances make us feel as invested in their future as we come to be in their past. Are the answers for them ahead? Are they behind? Or are they in the moment and it’s the lack of existing in the present that they must content with in order to be free? Spaces within spaces within spaces and all of it is connected.
Writer/director Michael Felker. Photo Credit: Elle León Nostas. Photo courtesy of SXSW.
There are sci-fi films involving time which operate at the highest level of spectacle, which may lead to audiences having to just let the film wash over them rather than explore it in minute detail due to the potential of inconsistencies in the logic. Then there are those for whom the details matter more than anything, thereby almost becoming devoid of humanity. Things Will Be Different is not just a title, but a declaration that resonates through the film. It’s one which, if paid any mind, will help audiences recognize that Felker’s debut feature is neither of the aforementioned sci-fi thrillers, but something in the middle where high-concept, low-fi execution, and character work meet, resulting in a profoundly human tale that’ll have you mulling it well past time ends. As the visual language explores the spaces within spaces, so does Felker encourage us to do the same, while, perhaps, taking away a lesson that not all spaces should be explored and that we owe ourselves a little forgiveness.
Screening during SXSW 2024.
For more information, head to the official SXSW Things Will Be Different webpage.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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